Angel Down
by BuffaloW1ngs
Summary: When Taylor triggered, the Queen Administrator shard just wasn't enough and cannibalized the Simurgh for her abilities. Now armed with precognition on a scale that terrorized the world, she'll do all the wrong things for all the right reasons, yet again. Rated M because it's Worm, and something will come along soon enough to justify that.
1. Chapter 1

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**Topic: SIMURGH DOWNED  
In: Boards ► News ► Events ► General  
Bagrat** (Original Poster) (The Guy In The Know)  
Posted on January 13, 2011:

You guys. It's confirmed. BBC has pics and footage that everyone in the world needs to see. At 5 am GMT, the Simurgh collapsed (footage here, excuse the quality, it was from a monitoring program) and fell in northern UK, just south of the Scottish border. Protectorate capes organized a fight, and showed up to find absolutely no resistance. Her body was exterminated with extreme prejudice, but it certainly took a hot minute (four hours before they managed to call in a combination of capes that could keep damaging her, even with regeneration off). She's dead.

No scream, no reaction the whole time, no motions, no powers. She was very likely dead when she hit the ground, considering that the (superficial) damage was still present when capes arrived on scene. No word on how that happened.

Keep the speculation to a minimum, whether she was taken down by a cape, by Tinkertech, or if this is some weird part of one of her plots, but this thread is dedicated to something more than that. The fact that Endbringers have been proven to be mortal. They can be killed, and while the difficulties met when finishing the job were far from encouraging, this is a great day for humanity.

And please be civil. This means a lot for a lot of people, and there will be people from all over who read this as they remember fallen loved ones and mourn. Don't be idiots, and the mods will probably destroy you if you are.

Thank god.

Edit: Scion was confirmed to be helping a cat out of a tree at the time. His patterns do not seem to indicate any involvement on his part. And like I said earlier, keep the speculation to a minimum. This isn't the thread for that.

* * *

I read over the thread, a gnawing sense of dread growing within me. I'd missed the whole thing, thanks to the Trio putting me in the hospital, but going off the official sequence of events?

I was in the locker when it happened. And with the things I'd seen in there, becoming a cape, witnessing those…_ things_, I couldn't help but wonder.

After everything that the Simurgh had done, all the people she'd killed and corrupted, what would it mean if I was her heir?

* * *

Walking to school, I felt like a passenger in my own life. Following a string that was already laid out for me, without any sense of agency. Even as the conflict built in my mind, I saw my string fray, splitting off into countless directions even as a rebellious part of my mind wondered if I could even reject the future. The thickest of them lead towards the library, where I might be able to kill time until Dad expected me home, though focusing, I could see the faint possibilities of simply turning down any street, stopping in place and sitting down in defiance, walking out into traffic and-

That one split, moving erratically, and I saw it change, showing me a safe path forward. It danced, showing me how I might avoid the car whose strand was only just now coming into view.

I blinked, and I saw it intersect with mine, though it wasn't exactly right. They would intersect, of course, but in its future and in my past. Or they could intersect, and my new path would be a firm one, as I was rushed to Our Lady's Medical Center. But no, there was an alternative that I saw, my original strand shifting, causing me to take the car's hit on my pelvis instead, causing worse injuries and receiving an ambulance triage me to visit Brockton General instead, where Panacea would visit me and I could be home before nine.

How had I seen so far? What was different about this, when I couldn't even see what I was going to eat for dinner that night? But no, that winding path became all the simpler to see, though still faint, as Dad warmed up a grilled cheese that he'd stashed in the refrigerator twelve hours from now. I swallowed hard.

My path developed a kink, intersecting with another, and I touched it carefully, somewhere in my mind, and like that, I knelt to tie my shoe.

It wasn't a compulsion. It was just… the way things could have happened, and I tapped into it. But just as I leaned down, I'd taken a small step, and I saw the new string's interaction with mine shift, altering to its new environment with a distinct lack of grace.

I stared down at Sophia Hess in near awe, and she stared up at me with a murderous look on her face. "What are you looking at, Hebert?" she demanded, getting to her feet with all the ease that she'd lost in that moment. I traced her line back, and tugged at my own, snapping it into its original position. I would have been pushed into the light post, bloodying my nose, and instead, I'd seen a way to alter the encounter.

"Well?" she demanded, stepping closer. I reached out and pulled, finding a frayed string and tugging on it lightly.

Behind me, Kyler Levenson coughed wetly, and with a disgusting sound, Sophia's fury was turned to him. "Did you just _spit_ a fucking _loogie_ at me?!" she demanded, wiping at her neck. I slipped away, turning once as I navigated through a group of people that had turned their attention to the scene, where Kyler protested something I didn't care about. Why had I turned? Oh, there. Because Madison would have seen me slip out of the crowd and her cronies would keep me there until Sophia's newly sparked anger could turn to me.

Walking through the school, I was freshly overwhelmed by the sea of strings, as individual as they were. Some tangled together, groups of friends talking with each other, some met and parted, and every one of them vibrating with life. I saw a thousand connections between a hundred people, all colored with their own experiences of the past second, and soon to be colored with all new ones, as soon as it would come their way. It was beautiful, in its own way, even as I found myself surrounded at my locker.

I couldn't even spare a thought to pay attention to the barbs that Emma threw my way as I retrieved my books. There was a desperate energy that her string thrummed with, pulsing with music as she searched for an opening into my mind. And then, my possibilities, all laid out before me. I only wished that I had enough time to search them all, to find the best way I could get her to leave me alone.

But with that intention alone, I saw paths start to turn away, as others opened. And like that, I felt a flare of hope. It was like confirmation that I wasn't following the paths, but I was directing them. No, I wouldn't slam it on that girl's fingers, nor would I hit Emma in the throat, or tell her that she should have died back when Sophia found her in-

Jesus, but my power was dark. How could I get her to just shut up?

"Are you really still talking?" I heard myself say. "You'd think that you could take a hint, or would it take another haircut for you to get there?" See? Harmless.

There was confusion in her eyes, and then, horrified realization. Like I'd laid her bare with a sentence. But I'd just said… what was it even, talking about her hair?

She was stunned into silence, but one of her cronies picked up the slack. Like a soldier trying to take the initiative to impress a superior. I saw the strand reach out into the future, seeking for an intersection of approval from Emma's own. She really had these girls eating out of her hand. I saw my own path out of the situation. "That's adorable. Move." My words were sickeningly sweet, and then suddenly hard, and I felt as though I was doing an impression of Emma herself. The girls obeyed unthinkingly, and I released the strand that I was holding to, moving to my next class.

There it was, another intersection that I didn't want to happen. But if I pulled that string over there into its way, then my own path would be unmolested. Opening the door, I saw Madison with glue all over her hands and shirt, glaring up at Greg Veder. A prank foiled before it could happen. Had I made it so it would backfire, though? How?

Class started, and I picked up a pencil as a spitball flew mere inches over my head. But I stopped myself from finishing the pull. I was only trying to alter my own path, why was I interfering with another one? Oh. It had hit Shen in the back of his head, and he turned the wrong way as Madison stashed the straw quickly. Without any target for his anger, I saw his strong color, but without any intersection between his and Madison's. Well, that wasn't exactly right. One possibility, if she'd get distracted while packing up, still be zipping up her bag while she was walking out of the classroom, and then trip over Greg's chair yet again as he pushes it back to get up. Chances of encounters and luck danced around me as I saw the strings flit about, intersecting this way and that, hypotheticals playing out in countless ways.

The class was almost over when I realized the possibility. I started to imagine what my possibilities were to tug on each available string when I finally saw the array of changes before me.

Greg would be getting up a few seconds later because he was looking for his pen. It'd fall to the floor, and he wouldn't notice, because he still used the pencil that he was supposed to be using on the ID card roster that was being passed around. But he'd keep the pencil instead of passing it on, and since the next guy was already using a pencil, he wouldn't try and take the one that Greg had in his hand.

It'd slow down the rotation as each student interrupted themselves to get a pencil out of their own bag, and that would give Kylie the opportunity to slip back into the conversation that Madison had elbowed her out of with a joke at my expense. You go, Kylie, good on you for hanging in there. That'll be your resume, and maybe Middle-Manager Madison will be kind enough to offer you an internship on the Torment Taylor Team. They call themselves a team, but really, they're more of a family. But how had Greg's pen ended up on the floor?

Tracing my own strand back, I saw where my actions intersected with the pen. I'd already set this whole thing in motion. I needed to be more careful about that. But how had-

My eyes widened. I'd used the other ability. There was a nick in the cap of the pen, a tiny gouge where my telekinesis had already reached out. My stupid superpowers were stuck on the lethal setting. Even the Simurgh hadn't been brutal enough to use exclusively telekinetic knives to do her work.

I'd been using it this whole time? But with Kyler, earlier, what was that? Why'd he coughed, how could I have…?

"Greg," I said, getting his attention, then glancing at the floor beside his bag. His pen, just where he wouldn't have seen it for a few critical seconds near the end of the period. He blinked, leaning over, then grinning at me in response before turning his attention back to Gladly.

* * *

I wandered the Boardwalk that afternoon, watching the interplay of strings before me. A crowd of people, all doing their best to keep their own paths to themselves. One by one, I reached for possibilities, for futures, for alternatives, and I left them all alone. I felt like a spider in a web, seeing countless possibilities before me.

A couple, about to break up. He knew it, and she didn't. He'd been planning on it for a while, but she had no idea. How did I know those things? Their lines were as tightly bound as any other couple's, but his interactions with hers were somehow different, no matter that they were the exact same interaction each time. But tracing his line and tracing hers were entirely different things.

A family, and the dad had seen the girl that he was cheating on his wife with. I cocked my head, wondering if I should nudge the interaction one way or the other. Should I make sure that they intersect, causing a confrontation, or to diverge them, so the kids won't be around when it happens? But why was it changing so frequently?

My attention flitted through the web, and I saw someone stumbling along it. Altering it, and several other paths. I was captivated instantly, and I watched as the girl stumbled through almost blindly, like someone in a dark room familiar to them, somehow avoiding the interactions that would result in a terrible outcome, but struggling to find them nonetheless. I could at least help her, right?

A man swore, further back in the crowd, and he knocked someone else over as he tripped, bringing him into a short argument that he tried to brush off. Tracing my action back, I saw my power slit the bag in a trash can, where someone had dumped their drink a few hours ago. The tile was slippery in the mere instant before he stepped on it, and the girl was pushing through the crowd.

I tried to focus on my ability's actions in the same moment that I strummed another string that was moving to intercept the girl, one that she hadn't noticed, and I saw my power cut the wiring inside a Boardwalk enforcer's earpiece. Inside, the rubber outside still intact. He turned his head as he tapped the earpiece, elbowing someone in the head. The girl looked about wildly, and her eyes met mine. She made a beeline straight towards me, and I saw the lines move to intercept her before every one of them delayed in their tracks. Another annoying interference, from the girl again? They still intersected with me, but further and further into the future. I tried my hardest to look nondescript.

I blinked. What just happened? The girl broke into a wide smile, holding her arms out for a hug. "Oh my god, Elizabeth, I've been looking for you for _ages_," she said, clearly playing it up. Negative, negative, negative, there was the positive interaction I was looking for. Why wasn't I supposed to call her Sarah?

My face brightened visibly, and I gave her a suffering smile. "I told you I was going to be late. Let me borrow your phone so I can call my dad, and we can get some food maybe?"

The girl took it in stride. "Course. Italian, maybe? No, fine, we can do Chinese." I had to keep my eyes from narrowing at her guesses. Had I caused that somehow too?

Sitting down in the corner of a restaurant, I saw the girl drop her mask. She was shaking slightly, and she met my eyes with an incredibly serious look. "Thank you. I don't know why you helped me, but from the bottom of my heart, thank you."

I blinked. "Wow, okay, uh, sure." We didn't talk for a long moment, but the men had ceased their pursuit just a minute after we left together, so it must have been okay. "Mind telling me what that was all about?" I prompted.

The girl glanced about. "I… don't mean to out you, but I'm a cape too. There's a guy who's trying to recruit me, and he's very, very bad news. They were trying to kidnap me."

I nodded. That was about the result that I'd seen happening. "Glad I could help."

"What were you doing to them? What do you do?"

Hesitating, I chose that moment for a drink of water. "I'm just really lucky." At her frank look, I decided to elaborate. "I can make lucky things happen," I elaborated.

"You don't have to tell me everything, that's fine. But how did you know that I was in trouble?"

Picking up my chopsticks, I tried to turn her attention back to the meal. "Can't you just buy me a meal to say thank you? I really don't want to be a part of this whole cape thing."

The girl blinked, cocking her head. "You're serious. But you're… wow, you're really powerful. You could have done a lot worse, couldn't you?"

My eyes narrowed. "Something to say?"

The girl put her hands up, but I could see a faint amusement dancing in her eyes. "Not at all, I just… sorry. I'm also a Thinker. Like Sherlock Holmes. I pick up things and fill in information from cues."

I pulled on my power, looking forward into the conversation. Terrified girl, angry girl, terrified girl, there. "I think that more conversation about these kinds of things would reveal more things about me that I wouldn't like revealed. So let's just have a good meal instead, okay?"

The girl cocked her head. "You were worried about scaring me. Trust me, I know some scary people that I'm still on good terms with. Well, good enough."

"Because I'm playing nice." It was a simple phrase, and her fear was hidden enough that I didn't feel too bad about taking it. But I saw our conversation starting to branch into a myriad of unfortunate outcomes, some far closer than I liked. "Dammit. Part of being lucky is that I can see what possible lucky outcomes could happen to me. And talking to you is like walking through a minefield of unfortunate things. So stop playing your games." There. Now we were back on track.

"You're a precog. You know what bad things will happen to people? Close enough. Wait, no, you can _cause_ them. With telekinesis! Oh wow, that's super cool."

The next strand that wove between conflicts was a small eye roll. "What did I say?" It sounded more playful than anything. But it was very intentional, guiding her away from thinking about why I might be scary. With a few more careful weaves, I would convince her that it was mostly bluster, and that would make up for the demonstration of this other girl's powers when she could tell that I didn't want to frighten her.

And then, unexpectedly, the girl's own strand ducked. I swore. "Whatever you're about to say-"

"You're using your power. What did you just try to avoid? That… oh." The girl went white.

My face went stony. "I control outcomes. And right now, the outcome that I'm working towards is one where you pay for our meal, we say pleasant goodbyes, and you don't try to get my attention on the street if you ever see me again."

She swallowed. "Listen, I think we got off on the wrong foot. I'm clearly out of my league here, but you really do need to believe me. I'm a troublemaker, I know, but please don't take it out on me. I really need your help, though."

My eyes narrowed. "Make it good. I'm aware of a lot of ways this conversation can end, and a lot of them are very annoying to me."

"Coil's trying to recruit me. If he does, I'll end up drugged in his basement answering questions and sitting in a cell while I waste away. He's trying to take over the entire city, and I can't _fucking_ figure him out." I blinked, and her path shifted and changed once again, giving me an entirely new branch of possibilities. I paused as I explored them, one after another.

"Why tell me? I told you that I don't want to be involved. Go to the PRT."

"I can't." She opened her mouth to speak again but was interrupted by her cell phone going off. She frowned, and then checked it.

"That's my home phone," I said, extending a hand.

"You really didn't have a cell phone, huh?" she mused. It sounded like it should have been a question from anyone else. I went ice cold as I heard an unfamiliar male voice.

I reached out, _hard._ I raced down my paths. End. End. End. Why was it keeping me from doing these things? There. My dad, sitting at home, while I read on the couch beside him. Where was this? Two days from now.

Did I trust my power?

"As long as Livesey goes free."

The girl went white as a sheet, staring at me. It was the right thing to say, and I didn't know why. I nodded my chin towards the door and she fled like she was being chased.

* * *

"So, please, walk me through this." Miss Militia sat across the table from me, and I folded my hands, glancing at the paths before me. Wow, there were a lot of intersections that I wasn't a fan of. Why was that so common? Armsmaster kept calling me a liar. Which, fair, but how was he…

"Armsmaster. If I use my power, I can beat your lie detector. But by doing so, I'll be automatically directing myself to what I think is the best short-term outcome. Now, I'm not saying that I want to lie to you as much as I like, but there's quite a few things that I need to be evasive about to protect my own interests and your knowledge of which things those are will make the whole thing counterproductive. I intend to work with you as best I can, yes, but I need you to either turn off the device or leave the room and deactivate the remote sensors that would assist in gathering data for later analysis." My dad looked stunned, and Miss Militia stared at me in utter shock.

Armsmaster was frozen stiff. "Miss, it's in your best interests to… Excuse me." Tracing his path, I saw him get into an argument with a voice in his visor about the ethics of someone stating that they were going to lie to him. Oh, was that Dragon? Were they friends? At least this was the result I'd been looking for.

"I suppose that's a good enough demonstration. Can I ask how your powers work, more specifically?" Miss Militia said after a moment.

I hesitated. "My ability gives me a very in-depth awareness of possible interactions between people. By focusing on certain interactions, I can learn what events would lead up to such an outcome, and I can trace my own strings to cause those events. The further removed an event is from my current position and time, the longer it takes for me to unravel the important data about an interaction. And please, Armsmaster, finish turning off the sensors."

She looked slightly perturbed at my last sentence, but my nodes were starting to resolve once again. Looks like he was playing along. "Can you give me an example? What interaction have you avoided there?"

I paused, tracing the string forward. "That one's a while from now, but Armsmaster won't interact with me again until he's ready to confront me over what he perceives to be holes in my story. I think the lack of nodes prior to that action made it easier to see and understand."

"A node being those points of interaction."

"Correct."

"And how did these things lead you to deal with Coil in… the way that you did?"

I swallowed. "It took almost an hour of real-time to figure that one out. In terms of experiences, that's… a long time for me. But following his threads backward, I figured out that he has a very similar power to mine, if a more limited version of it. He can follow two strands at once, leading to a simultaneous experience in which he can gather information and assess outcomes for the strand he chooses to split next. Apparently, he chose to use his men to confront me in one branch pathway, leading to a man I hardly knew anything about who had a pretty good idea of what I could do."

I glanced at the glass of water on the table, then took a drink to delay my next words for a few seconds. "I saw a string of very bad outcomes, which I now believe indicates that Coil did not intend to succeed in recruiting me the first time around. My interactions started to resolve in his favor, leading to the long-term goal of his imprisonment and my father's safety. I believe that he started using his ability again a few hours ago when I started prodding the conversation towards mutual cooperation, as his behavior started to become more erratic. I think that his alternative timelines began resolving violently, as he started to deploy aggressive countermeasures, and I took him down."

Glancing over to my dad, I took his hand. "From there, I followed strands that would ensure enough evidence could be gathered to ensure a Birdcage sentence, and we wouldn't ever be subject to his interference again."

Like I'd told Armsmaster before, I'd been evasive. His strands reacted to my own through their own movements, independent of my stimuli. I'd just needed to wait for them to stop moving, just once, and I'd be safe to act without him dropping this timeline. And it had hardly been difficult to learn his ability. Tracing his own strand back, I was able to gain a sense of where he gathered his own information from, likely due to how close his ability was to my own. But it wouldn't do to expose my capabilities and limitations so easily, particularly when I was so cautious of the outcomes that would result from my involvement in the Wards program.

Miss Militia seemed stunned. "Well. You seem to be quite the capable young woman," she said, and I felt a flush rise onto my face. Huh. Maybe looking too far ahead was still enough to surprise me at the moment. I'd have to keep that in mind. "Can I ask if you've considered the Wards program?"

I grimaced, and she seemed to read exactly what that meant. "No, it's not like that," I said immediately. "I've been staying away from those models for a reason. Wards have to unmask to each other, and I can only imagine the nightmare of NDAs that would be. And if the precedent gets set, you guys could theoretically demand that I sign one for every Protectorate-sponsored hero that I could model an interaction with, so long as there's a chance I could cause them to unmask to me."

"That's rather open of you to say," she said, seeming far more unconcerned than I would have expected, had I not already experienced this conversation the minute prior. "Can I ask why you're volunteering this information?"

"Because Director Piggot would bring it up rather threateningly, and most interactions lead to her actually threatening me with it. I… my trigger event, as well as some significant experiences I've had, has led me towards some significant trust issues with authority figures. But I'm going to theoretical therapy for it, don't worry." She actually laughed at that, drawing a smile from me. I could see why she was such a figurehead for the local Protectorate.

"What about consultation?" she asked. "It sounds like your involvement in an operation would be invaluable. With your father's permission, of course, we would be extremely grateful to have your insight, even over just a phone call. Rather than joining the Wards, you could be an on-call Thinker, maybe give us an advantage when we have a planned operation."

"You're going to have some significant difficulties with the Youth Guard about that," I warned her. "Unless you bend the rules a little bit and pretend like you haven't already determined my age and identity."

Miss Militia blinked. "I assure you-"

"That it was simply the result of your standard procedures when coming into contact with an apparently civilian family," I finished for her easily. Dad would have started to get mad, but I needed him to let me keep taking the lead if this was going to work. "It's fine, really. But if you can get those records purged, then we're going to be able to work together far more easily." Now for another of those lies that I had so carefully negotiated for. Thank you for playing along, Armsmaster. "And it _will_ be necessary to prevent a debilitating injury to one of your teammates in the next few weeks. Force me to tell you who, and it will almost certainly be someone else. Or let me be an anonymous voice on the phone, and I can help save you."

She sat back in her seat, looking for all the world like a new weight was on her shoulders. "I don't think we've ever had access to a precog like you before," she said, shaking her head. "These details are going to need to be ironed out with Director Piggot."

"She and I won't get along," I said, with utter conviction. "If she meets me in person, then either she or I will alienate the other if we have to discuss terms in person. If we're to have a working relationship, she needs to see that I can help people before she talks to me. In exchange for my help, I want a transfer to Arcadia sometime within the next month, and a secure cell line with no tracker. If it stays in, then I'll leave it behind and miss at least one call, also within the next two weeks, though it likely will not result in any Protectorate losses. Sound good?"

The heroine across from me paused, then nodded. "I'm confident we can get you those things." And somehow, I didn't doubt it. She was already convinced that I could keep her team safe, or at least safer than they otherwise would be.

I glanced over to my dad. "That about it?"

My face fell slightly when I saw how he was looking at me before he quickly composed himself with a shake of the head. "No, looks like you've got it under control, kiddo."

I nodded slowly, mulling it over. "Alright. It sounds good, then. Tell Armsmaster that his tranquilizer will work on Lung if he gets it injected in the neck or torso, and to use a fast-acting aerosol if he wants to take in Oni Lee alive, or the current one if he doesn't mind a body."

* * *

**Hey everyone, thanks for reading. My writing style's a bit disjointed, I'm aware, but I'm happy to blame all that on Simurgh shenanigans. Taylor's got very little to do with her own actions when she's focused on achieving nodes so far ahead of her, and fighting Coil was more like background noise in the meantime. I wasn't satisfied with anything I wrote about the intermediary, so we used Taylor's experience as our reference, moving straight to the part with her father safe, her powers revealed on her terms, and with the first steps towards building a professional relationship with the PRT complete.**

**I'm a big fan of using Coil as a villain, but I do find that his arcs will inevitably be too long or too short in anything I write. Here, though, he's got his fingers in too many pies for Taylor to miss, especially with how easily she can spot Thinker effects in her web. So Coil's gone before Skitter went out for the first time in canon, let the butterflies commence.**

**And one last thing, please forgive the formatting errors. I'm still figuring out how to best publish on this site.**


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

I stood in the center of my room, my web of strings splayed around me. I was getting faster as I learned to tune my peripheral attention towards the relevant nodes, though that distraction was already keeping me from reading possibilities as quickly as I wanted. So far, my main problem was scope. The further I got from my current position, the more difficult it became to remain focused on my real objective, as each new tangent showed me more and more possibilities. I was already multitasking far beyond my limits, compartmentalizing heavily and leaving vast gaps in my plans that I'd have to fill in later when I finally got to them. I knew it would be possible, of course, but what did scaring off a small villain group that had started squatting in one of Coil's old bases have to do with getting an audience with the Triumvirate? I could only hold onto three or four of these stepping stones before my reach would fail me, so I'd really just have to be satisfied with my lack of awareness.

The biggest problem that I faced, though, was the depth of information that I was slowly becoming aware of. Each string wasn't just a path, but an entire life, and each segment, an experience. I'd stumbled upon it when I held to Dad's string for too long, trying to figure out how I could pull on it without harming him. I wanted to use a delicate touch, after all, enough to keep my interference from being noticed. I'd already found out my power's strange preference for causing people misfortune whenever I avoided harm, but what if that had come from myself? I wasn't exactly trying to keep Sophia from getting into some negative interactions of her own when I'd played the strings to minimize the impact on me. Something subconscious?

But when I was trying it out on Dad, I could feel… something. Emotions, intent. Some words, just moments before they came out of his mouth. Far from an inner dialogue, but couldn't that be what mind-reading was like? I didn't have the benefit of being in his head to translate everything.

The bastard daughter of the Simurgh, and probably the only true telepath on the face of the planet. If it ever came out, the full details of my capabilities, at least, I'd be branded as an Endbringer and everything I'd accomplished would be suspect. Hell, they might just quarantine the entirety of my hometown to keep the state from ending up like Switzerland. I wouldn't even be sent to the Birdcage, not even if I surrendered. I kept my attention away from nodes like that; I had enough issues as it was.

I needed to figure out my other abilities, and soon. Tracing my own strand backward into precognition, I'd found discovered a misconception. The cough, back when I first started experimenting with my powers, I'd depressed an area of that guy's lung to make him think that he'd swallowed something. Nasty, I knew, but it was still force distributed over an area. Even with the pen, I'd nicked it. So what had changed?

My web disintegrated as I stopped playing with possibilities, and I was right back where I started, with nothing more than the hints I'd managed to remember. But it was a pipe dream, to say the least. Going higher would just put more eyes on me, and I hadn't had the grasp to explore each of the branch paths, at least not beyond a single reaction node. I needed to figure out my telekinesis, first.

Why was this one so different? Everything else had been so close to the Simurgh's abilities, but she'd never cut anything before. Sure, she'd rip a building apart, but my telekinesis was so specialized that I couldn't pick up anything heavier than an orange without cutting it into pieces. Even then, I felt like I was using chopsticks, balancing it on the tips of a whole cluster of knives if I wanted to pick something up. How sharp would a knife have to be before it would cut through something you placed on top of it?

I was missing something. What was different about the way I'd used telekinesis that single time? It wasn't simply because I used a string to activate it. Each of the attacks on Coil's men were performed by cuts, as subtle as they were. From necessity? Because it would have resulted in a worse outcome for me if I'd cut his lungs? But somehow, I doubted that an Endbringer's power was worried about causing minimal harm, especially considering how dead set it seemed on trolling people around me.

I ran through my own actions, again and again, before I finally saw it. Nothing in the situation, and nothing from my intent. But rather than pull the string into the position I wanted, I'd… what? Strummed it? Like a guitar string?

I watched it again, seeing the effects assemble themselves into the chord that resolved my interaction. I saw my ability play the string, a single note, resonating with the strings it intersected with, delivering the effect harmlessly.

I sat down, stunned. I'd thought that the Simurgh's powers were unrelated somehow, a Shaker and a Thinker effect that acted on separate wavelengths. But it was all the same focus. I was a mind that could exert itself on its surroundings. Not guitar strings, but more like piano wires, I thought to myself. I'd been reaching into the instrument to whack at the wires myself, on the vague notion that I could play the song better than if I'd used the keys.

It took a good second to refocus myself onto the strings of the objects in the room. Why was that harder than focusing on the strings that came from people? Because they didn't interact with things on their own? Strumming one, I saw my orange lift up an inch and a half, then fall back onto the table.

As underwhelming as it was, I couldn't help but grin. Superpowers. Well, that was dumb, considering that I'd been using my other powers almost nonstop since I got comfortable with them the other day. But still! They were there, and I just needed to, well, learn the precise amount of effort that I would put into anything.

Damn.

It didn't hit me until after a few minutes of testing. This wasn't how I was supposed to learn. I had access to countless experiences, and I chose to play with the single slowest one? I looked at my branching string, focusing on the fainter ones to see how I could expand from here.

I saw myself nudge the door closed, then slam it as I misjudged the strength of my second attempt. The desk shuddered in another, and the wall thumped as I turned my attention to two more strings. But no, I didn't want that either. I found an even fainter string and found an idea that seemed all too logical, yet just abstract enough that I'd almost passed it over.

Because the importance of lifting an object wasn't for its own sake. It was for the purpose of affecting a node. Causing an interaction. I watched myself trace the possibility of the orange's movement towards my own string, and it leaped into my hand. I flicked my attention back to the start, and I saw my breakthrough, without even needing to figure it out myself.

I'd played my own string. It probably shouldn't even count as telekinesis, really. It was just… causality, I supposed? That probably wasn't the right word, but it seemed close enough. I'd found an effect, and my power had provided the cause.

I exhaled quietly. Was that how the Simurgh had fought? Playing strings like this? She'd apparently been able to launch projectiles at close to a hundred different targets, but what made more sense, that she'd tracked each of them individually, or that she'd just decided that they were going to be hit, and to let her abilities take care of the rest?

I probably shouldn't keep practicing this in my room. Maybe Dad would call Winslow tomorrow, tell them I'm sick, and I could play with my powers more.

Interactions, not effects. I kept thinking about my abilities in the wrong way. I had such perfect control so long as I remained in my element, but each of my difficulties came when I started to misinterpret where my skills could be applied. Not that being able to cut things with a thought wasn't cool, but that wouldn't be the power of a hero.

I was almost dozing off when my thoughts snapped me back awake. The Simurgh had a Manton limitation, right? Otherwise, she'd just snap the necks of everyone that had come her way. Why had I been able to play with my classmate's lung like that? Either I had capabilities that even the Simurgh didn't…

Or she'd just… chosen not to.

Oh… damn it. Really? Maybe that wasn't the case. Maybe I was just overthinking things, and I was going to come up with something better later on. I could use my simulated thinking, right?

I stopped myself. That was just the equivalent of brainstorming. It didn't give me any new information, it just cut out the time between coming up with ideas. Which was, of course, incredibly useful, but unlike with my telekinesis, I didn't have a metric for determining which conclusion would be accurate.

This was dumb. I needed to sleep.

* * *

School would have been an absolute slog if not for all the opportunities it gave me. My web seemed easier to access, less… theoretical. Still theoretical, of course, but less so. The right words were still just out of reach for me, probably a symptom of all these puny humans being unable to experience more than one moment at a time.

That was a joke, I reassured myself. But I should probably dial it back on the dark humor before I said something like that around anyone jumpy.

Walking to the cafeteria for the first time in months, I turned my focus to my path. Options displayed themselves to me, some coming to the forefront of my mind as others shriveled away, already anticipating my selections. I discarded the brightest of them, where I would move in just the right ways to avoid attention. Then the secondary branches, where a misunderstanding would lead Madison to believe that someone saw me heading out towards the parking lot to eat in peace, and Sophia and Emma would put me out of their minds.

No, my power allowed me to walk through a minefield without fear. If the Trio had been so kind as to give me this power, then surely, they wouldn't mind helping me perfect it.

I was going about it wrong, still. To have an increased understanding of my power was a vague goal, and it wasn't even an interaction between me and something else. No, I needed a goal. An outcome to work towards. What did I want?

I wanted the school to take responsibility for what they'd done. I wanted Emma and Sophia to take the blame for sticking me into the locker, and I wanted to solve my problems here permanently.

I went white as my power provided a solution. The pair of them would suffer accidents; Sophia would slip and land on an upright tray, crushing her trachea, and the panicked nurse who arrived would botch the tracheotomy, killing her. Emma would stumble backward, someone would get out of her way, and hit her head on the corner of a bench, fracturing her skull and pushing a tiny shard into her brain, where it'd go unnoticed by the doctors for far too long. By the time they got a specialist, she'd suffer enough brain damage that she would never again interact with me.

That couldn't be the best way to do this. Why'd I thought of that first? Endbringer powers, I reminded myself. Focus on one interaction at a time. Emma and Sophia being punished for their actions. Forcing the school to take the blame would happen next, and then I could figure out how to keep them away from me later. In a non-lethal way.

With a start, I realized that I'd still only made it halfway to the line of trays. Why was I buying food again? I'd brought my lunch today, like always. I hadn't been planning on coming here. Had I already set one of my plans in motion?

No, the divergent point was still to come. But that tray, thirty-second in the stack, the one that I'd end up picking, could be the one to knock another off the table in such a way that Sophia would be killed in the accident. I turned my focus back to my web. No revenge fantasies. I would make sure that this happened in the right way. Just with nudges from me, of course. Things needed to happen in a certain way, and I was in a unique position to put them into place.

I was halfway to the food line when I'd found the result I'd wanted. A police officer in Blackwell's office. By tomorrow afternoon? Wasn't that a bit fast? One girl in tears, someone in Emma's retinue that I doubted I could name, and the officer scribbling on his notepad. I could get someone to turn on Emma, I realized. I held tightly to the result, and a strand came into focus, illuminating the interactions along the way. It was subtle, this time, but I could feel my power strumming at the strings, nudging them into position.

Back in his office, Gladly's coffee sloshed, spilling on his tie, causing him to go into the teacher's bathroom to wipe it off. The walk-in freezer clicked shut, delaying a cafeteria worker for about eighty seconds, and another one for fifteen, so I wouldn't arrive at my table until someone else had gotten up to grab something from their car before lunch was over. Someone bumped into Julia as she was talking, making her stumble in her words, annoying Emma and causing her to elbow Julia out of the conversation, leading to her to want to insert herself into the conversation again more aggressively, leaving more openings. What twisted webs we weave.

A hundred other things fell into place. Sophia caught someone's eye, some guy from the track team that thought she was cute. Two adjacent groups got into arguments, each starting to get louder to be heard over the other, and the noise in the cafeteria started to rise because of it. I played the strings before me as I built towards the crescendo, the climax that would finally come into being twenty-five hours from now.

I soared through the model ever faster, finding intersection after intersection, idly placing food onto my plate. And then I froze. I saw myself two minutes from now, taking a strand and pulling it over to the interaction I wanted. Not a reaction from my interference, or resonance from my own string's actions, but an actual moment where I picked up someone's fate and redirected it elsewhere.

I let my web dissolve. I could do this at any time. But this was something I needed to handle right now.

Was I overthinking this? I altered people's fates all the time, just through outside stimuli. What was the difference between making Gladly spill his coffee and just placing his string into the actions that would lead to him walking by the cafeteria at the right moment to see someone slap Emma across the face? It wasn't agency; I had already taken the choice away from him.

But that was a Master effect. It wasn't telepathy, but it was undoubtedly an overwriting of the girl's mind, just on the smallest scale possible. Someone who had records of a group chat, one bad enough to damn both of my targets. She only needed the smallest of nudges to be put onto my side, but it was a nudge nonetheless.

I scrapped the whole web. I wasn't going to cross a line like that, not until I was satisfied with my own self-justification.

"Six fifty," a bored voice came to me. My node flashed into being, and I swiped my student ID as I depressed two keys on the cafeteria worker's keyboard, logging the meal as prepaid. The screen blinked at him, and I walked off, weaving a new web that would let me eat in peace. If it really was a small nudge, I'd be able to accomplish it over a longer period of time through external stimuli only. If it wasn't, and I wouldn't be able to without Mastering another student, then I'd have to give up that option. And that was fine. I'd only been at this goal for ten minutes or so. I could- should- spend enough time on it to do it right.

* * *

Stepping out onto the street, I couldn't help but feel nervous again. The last time I was wandering around to play with my web hadn't exactly led to a smooth series of events, after all, but at the least, I'd scouted further ahead this time. And considering that Armsmaster would almost inevitably catch me if I was testing my abilities in the Boat Graveyard, and I didn't want to get recognized at the Boardwalk, moving about aimlessly seemed to be somehow… better.

I wanted to avoid a goal, this time. My breakthroughs were coming one after another, at a rather rapid pace, if I was honest with myself, but none of them were already identified as an endstate when I'd started working. I was still worrying that I was directing myself subconsciously, but that was a rabbit hole. If I was controlling my actions without my knowledge, then there was nothing I could do about it. And if I wasn't, then it was no use worrying about it. Descartes knew what he was talking about, I suppose. Look at that, useful information from a public school social studies class.

I was becoming dangerously unlimited, I thought to myself, as I pressed on a car's brake pedal a second and a half before it would have been too late. He wouldn't have hit the car in front of him, but he'd have been rear-ended because the guy behind him wouldn't react fast enough. How many other people used their powers like this? Creating subtle good that no one would ever recognize. Even if they did, I'd never notice, unless they had Thinker powers I could see in my web.

The weight of responsibility settled on me as I started overthinking things. Would I even be able to sleep well, knowing that if I stayed up later, I might be able to alter more things around me? But then, rather than guilt, I felt notes of apathy in my string. It was useful, being able to look at my own mind as an outside observer, rather than trying to navigate it from within. Apathy, as cold and expansive as I imagined the surface of the moon to be, demonstrating how little I could accomplish should I try to take everything onto my shoulders. I was one person, with one power, as useful as it was. What was I supposed to…

God, but why did everything always come back to my web? I was the Simurgh reborn, I reminded myself. Her cruelty didn't come from her in the moment, not the worst of it, at least, it came from the ripples in her web. I was still so self-centered, thinking that I was the one who would solve these problems.

A gentle note as I strummed one string and someone coughed in time to divert a policeman's attention up at a husband holding his wife's arm a bit too tightly. But would that be enough? He'd have excuses aplenty, she might not say anything was wrong, the cop might decide not to involve himself. I chastised myself again. Those were my trust issues returning. I doubted I'd ever be free of them.

The world had been torn apart by an Endbringer, to the point that we would abandon cities in her wake, keeping people trapped inside like plague victims. And as I'd seen all too easily, my power was uniquely suited to that end. Causing mishaps was as easy as reaching out my arm, and tearing things apart would always be simpler than knitting them back together. And yet, if I was going to help people, if I was going to put this ability towards something useful, that's what I'd need to do.

My mind pulled back, not towards me, but upwards. Or maybe like opening a fish-eye lens, granting me a larger field of view. There it was, showing me more and more of what I wanted to see.

Events felt compressed, giving me more information in a shorter amount of time. I didn't remain at each intersecting string for very long, just enough to get a sense of what was occurring. I spied on intimate moments, a pair my age holding hands for the first time, then a lone man with a phone to his ear, silent, as tears rolled down his cheeks. Moments, some precious, some terrible, and I felt that apathy fade.

There were things I could do, here. I couldn't shut my eyes to these things.

There was a story, or was it a parable? Didn't come from the Bible, but the term might fit. After high tide, a man at the beach saw that the shore was covered in sea stars, water-starved, and left to die by the water. And near him, a little boy was busy tossing them back into the ocean, one by one. The man asked what the kid was doing, that there were thousands of the things, and his efforts wouldn't matter. The boy tossed another starfish, then said, "It mattered to that one."

I helped a bicycle swerve out of the way as I plucked another string, then righted him with another. All I did was keep him from bruising his knees that day; he'd have managed to avoid the people in front of him regardless, but that could make his day better, right? A woman tried to shush her crying baby, her phone spilling out of her bag as she did so. I reached out to pluck a string, and I felt myself moving towards her. Had I dissociated that much, that I was unable to recognize my own string of fate?

String of fate. Wow, I wondered if I could blame being dramatic on my power. "Sorry to bother you, but you look kind of overwhelmed. Can I give you a hand?" An interaction was clear before me, the woman looking relieved, but still exhausted, and I felt my actions guide me towards the path. With a start, I realized that I'd extended my arms, and she was already looking up at me, trying to hand me her child.

This couldn't be normal, I thought to myself, my hands moving automatically to hold the baby against me. God, if I'd accidentally Mastered her to give me her baby? I'd need to inspect this interaction later with postcognition.

"Thank you," she said quietly, gathering her things. Her phone had a crack in it and seemed to have turned off, but I plucked a string, and the battery settled back in place beneath its case. It flickered into its startup sequence, and I joined the woman on the bench. I didn't say anything for several long moments, and the woman collected herself, before retrieving the baby from my arms.

I stood, continuing my walk, letting the branches from that interaction fade away. It was a simple task, a moment out of my day, but somehow perfectly placed in her own. She'd felt alone, but it had brought her a flare of hope when a stranger gave her a couple of seconds.

Going cold, I closed my eyes and stopped as I leaned against the wall. My postcognition flickering on, I saw myself grasp her strand, attuning my own mind to hers and feeling that same gratitude. Stop using telepathy, Taylor. That's how you get labeled as an S-Class threat.

* * *

**Taylor, considering not just the ends, but the means as well? OOC, I know, but you can blame it on a Simurgh plot if you need justification. I usually go overboard when I write an OP character, so Taylor's going to have to be her own morality chain for the time being.**

**You're going to have to excuse the power-based navel-gazing for this chapter, but to me, that's some of the best part of superpowers. It'll speed up again soon enough when she starts getting tangled in things more interesting than high school drama, but for now, I'm pretty invested in setting the rules that she operates by.**

**Thanks for reading, and thanks to each of my reviewers for taking the time out of their day to make sure I can improve this story. You're something of makeshift beta readers, so any advice you have is greatly appreciated. Excuse the slightly shorter chapter, but I need to get my writing out there to make sure I'll keep working on it. Until next time, everyone.**


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Endstate: Blackwell taking me seriously. Location: three days from today, on a Friday afternoon, when she's about to go home and drink, so she can forget all her responsibilities even more effectively than she already does. Interaction: She's red-faced, sputtering, and doing her absolute best not to make things worse. It was a glorious fantasy, and I played it through a few times to help get over how much _work_ this was going to be.

I traced it backward, a rather disorienting trip, but necessary since I'd let so many crucial nodes fade from my attention. I saw Alan Barnes storm out of his own office in reverse, then his face shift from horrified realization to businesslike professionalism. The moment he realized that he was helping bring his own daughter to justice. Poetic, wasn't it? It was too late, he'd already brought his partner onto the scene, and she was too invested in the case to drop it on his rather evasive request.

I was at the library, putting together a binder full of documents and references from legal PDFs I'd gotten from the internet, enough to argue a case of duress when we'd signed the release that we not sue the school. It wouldn't be enough, had we not used Alan's relationship with a local judge to agree to binding arbitration, but it wasn't going to happen anyway. I wanted criminal charges, not civil ones. And as I'd learned, it wasn't always the money itself, but rather the threat of a suit that was more effective.

I wasn't going to be able to pressure the school with an outcome, but I sure as hell could do it with the nodes leading up to one.

I was at school, and Emma was walking away with a self-satisfied smirk. I mentioned to Greg that I'd be at the mall later today and that my dad wasn't going to be there. Emma needed to be gone when my dad and I showed up, and Alan would be out the door before she returned, fruitlessly searching for me, and he wouldn't mention that he was helping out her good friend with a lawsuit until he'd already introduced us to one Carol Dallon.

Back at the library, starting the binder, highlighting and circling things one at a time. The stack of papers decreased piece by piece, and I arrived at the library.

And there I was, talking to Dad about my intentions. He had a couple favors to call in, and a whole different chain of events would start off. But I wasn't going to explore that one, yet. I was disoriented enough already, watching this path in reverse.

And there, my starting point. Tomorrow morning, rooting around in Dad's desk for our copy of the school's signed agreement with us. Now, I just needed to figure out the details.

A lawyer's retainer fee? Waived, so long as I could direct Alan and Dad to talk about how long it'd been first, and if I could get him to salivate over the good press, he could get over a case like this. Dad would have already called a guy who wrote for the paper he'd helped out a couple of years ago, back when the Dockworkers were in a bit better condition. Carol Dallon wouldn't be so eager to start working before she got paid, and wouldn't be willing to take it pro bono, but all I needed was her name and a phone call from one of her paralegals. She'd know enough people to pass our case along to someone else, who'd take us more seriously because it came from a colleague, not from a teenager and her overworked dad.

Alan's resistance? Oh, I definitely needed to refine that. I was resorting to some pretty underhanded accusations in my current model, but he still needed to be kept off his feet. But somehow, that wasn't entirely necessary, as the bad press was apparently going to be enough to give me the desired result. But where was this coming from?

I saw more lines begin to converge with the current branch, and I went cold. Plainclothes PRT officials, a man and a woman, one angry, and one defensive. They were there for… Sophia?

I went cold. I shouldn't be investigating this route, I knew, and I'd already learned too much. Sophia was connected to the PRT.

I dropped the model. I knew this one well enough. I started fresh, storming into Blackwell's office tomorrow morning and demanding to know if Sophia was a Ward. She'd go stark white, and threaten me with an NDA. I stormed in again, for the first time, telling her that if the PRT knew she was covering up Sophia's actions, she'd be fired almost immediately. It was a revenge fantasy, plain and simple, but I wasn't going to bother searching for an ideal outcome for this. I just wanted to know what she'd say.

Nothing came of it, because the PRT hadn't heard yet. And then, the answer was obvious. After a quick model, checking to see if I could get away with it, I glanced at the interactions needed to achieve my goal.

Use a public phone and call in that I witnessed an assault with a parahuman ability at my school, using fake tears and some heavy use of my string-paths to disguise my voice beyond what Armsmaster could tie to me. Use my models when Armsmaster starts to ask me questions and asks around the school, and his lie detector will absolve me of future accusations of outing a Ward. At least for a while, but I wasn't going to get hung up on it. I should be able to donate some time before then, and I'll be useful enough for them to forgive by that point.

I'd gotten into this when the school had failed me. But my models were proving that while the PRT was apparently dangerously negligent, they could also be the ones to fix it. I could fix it myself, obviously, but if I was honest with myself, and it was getting annoyingly difficult not to be, I didn't want to. And like I was learning, I wasn't the only person around that wanted to set things right.

Didn't help me much with everything that came before, but maybe they could make things a bit better before I left that hellhole forever.

One more big detail loomed, however. Getting away with it. The PRT had firsthand data about how detailed my models could be. I held a model in my head, of Director Piggot apologizing for her suspicion, and found the pathways leading to it suspiciously absent. How about Miss Militia apologizing on her behalf?

Much easier. A crooked smile came to my face. Yeah, that woman and I would really hate each other. I'd have to give them an elaborate story about how I'd tried to get one of my bullies' friends to turn on them, and I'd failed to account for the fact that they might go to the PRT rather than to the police. I just didn't have enough information, hence why Sophia had apparently been unmasked. But the girl had been discreet about it, so it was no use chasing her down, and she didn't seem to be trying to reveal Sophia's civilian identity. And it was Sophia's fault, anyway, using her parahuman ability to commit crimes where people could see her.

I sat back on the couch, exhaling heavily. Would I need to reassert how useful a phone call to me would be after that? No, because after they'd call me this weekend to figure out how to safely disable Squealer's most recent monstrosity without taking casualties, they'd be rather impressed that I could handle the situation with Velocity alone. In the debrief, I could bring up a few more details as to how future situations could be handled, and I'd be even higher on their list of assets.

I was getting off track. But something about the parahuman conflict drew my attention, far more easily than the rest of my models. I _wanted_ to be involved there. And somehow, with just the same intensity, I didn't want to call in and tell Velocity how to stop it before it happened.

Then there'd be casualties, though. I pushed through, pulling out my PRT issued phone. "This is Insight. I'd like to pass on a message to Velocity."

"One moment," a male voice returned. "You're being recorded."

"Sunday, January 21st, be in the vicinity of the Docks no earlier than 0958 and no later than 1003. Show up too early, and Squealer will attack elsewhere, or at a different time. Too late, and Oni Lee will respond personally by 1012. I can't be more specific than that. Her vehicle will have a large chrome grill on the back, where she's placed the main power supply to her weapon's systems. There'll be space to fit in a foam grenade. Toss one more in the undercarriage, and her engine will fail. She'll be sufficiently isolated from accompanying non-powered gang members by that point, so you will be free to take her in. Upon taking her into custody, I'll be able to give advice on how to retain her against Merchant efforts to free her. End message."

The man on the phone paused. "Message received."

"Thank you." I hung up the phone, anxiety growing in the pit of my stomach. I… hadn't even modeled the fight. All I'd done was model the conversation. Looking that far forward would only be useful if I'd dedicated myself to a singular goal, but why had my conversation been so… certain? Surely I'd cause some kind of butterfly effect to change the time of the attack before then.

Recursion, perhaps? Maybe my conversation was already a factor in making sure it would happen the way I said it would happen. The details of how to take down her tank likely wouldn't change, as her tech was probably either already completed, or wouldn't change enough to alter the method of attack.

Or maybe I'd just have to call again later, to give them updated intelligence on when and where the attack would occur. As long as I modeled my phone call again before the attack happened, I could keep it up to date.

I was still gazing at my model when I dozed off, and my attention finally spotted a thin, somehow significant string that connected the two models I'd played with. Huh. Maybe I hadn't dropped the mental model as completely as I'd thought when I started building a new one. I hoped that shouldn't worry me.

* * *

When I woke to my alarm, I found my web screaming at me. I was shocked awake in an instant; with Coil and Tattletale, they'd affected other strings than their own, but only as far as their Thinker abilities could reach. What did it mean when things shifted so quickly, and with such intensity?

I saw my line whip out the door, firm and steady in the face of the oncoming waves. I pulled on my jeans and a sweatshirt, not even noticing my telekinesis kicking in as it moved to assist me, bringing me my clothes and a pair of sandals. I hoped I didn't need to run, but I needed to get away from Dad.

End. End. End. End. I'd never seen so many dead ends before. I danced between them before I found myself on a bus, my heart hammering. A woman in a suit, I'd only managed to spot her once, in a single pathway that I'd had to layer more and more theoretical effects on. Her face looked almost shocked as she saw me meet her eyes before her weapon fired, and that timeline went dark.

Advantage. I didn't know why, but that dead-end timeline shuddered with the word. The woman's abilities were coming into conflict with mine, and I'd managed to surprise her. My web screamed again, and I started layering possibility over possibility, and they started to shut themselves off one by one.

Think. She was anticipating my actions, responding before I was able to accomplish anything. A new mental model, getting off the bus right now and fleeing. Possibility, possibilities, more and more…

There. In the instant before I died, a glowing space in the air, where the bullet that ended me would come from.

She was killing me without hesitation, but I was still alive. Why was I still alive? She could be here whenever she chose. But she was only killing my other timelines, witnesses be damned.

What was the furthest I could see? There. I created a mental model, decided firmly to follow it, and walked in the other direction. The woman appeared in person, a pistol in her hands, before she stared at the empty alleyway, stunned. She looked as though she'd never been surprised before, and she disappeared back through the glowing space.

I walked off the bus, my body screaming at me that I was defying it but supported by my telekinesis. Someone looked at me, concern evident on their face, and I mumbled an apology as I pushed by.

She could be surprised, and she didn't think she could. Was she aware of her failures in the possibilities of the other timelines? Likely not, otherwise, she could have prevented them before she'd given the game away. My strings didn't slow.

A wallet came to my hand. I pushed by someone entering a cab, clinging desperately to one model after the next, ditching them as quickly as I saw her notice me. She was still coming, but I was starting to keep pace with her.

I pushed the wallet towards the cabbie and didn't even hear my own voice as I rattled off a series of instructions. I _pushed_, harder than I ever had before, and a gasp came to my lips, unbidden, as I saw the series of possibilities before me.

It wasn't even a web. It was a tree, twisted and gnarled, but still with a path available to me. It branched and extended forward, and I could see the chances I had at life extend into the future.

I watched in horror as my pursuer began to trim the tree down, cutting down individual branches, one at a time, but at an incredible rate. I gritted my teeth and layered as many possibilities as I could think of, hundreds of them, most of them stupid.

I saw myself jump out of the car and lay face down on the road. A new branch that took her attention for a precious moment. I ran, and she caught me. I found a police officer and dove in the back of his car, and I died again. It didn't matter what it was, but as I pushed, I forced the tree to thrive, and delay her as she tried to close my window of survival.

But still, she was gaining on me. As quickly as I came up with new models, new stings to focus on, she would cut me off. Each new idea was countered with brutal efficiency, all the more so when a second figure appeared to back her up. A man this time, also in a suit.

Fuck! What was I missing? I couldn't look forward, as soon as I had a possibility to pursue, she was able to home in on me. I needed the entire tree active at once, closing as many of my branches as I could.

Tears came to my eyes. I wasn't going to die here. How could I stop her? My telekinesis flared to life as I went on the theoretical offensive, and after I managed to kill her, just once, it failed. I started throwing projectiles, and more glowing shapes appeared, stopping me in my path.

Wait, was that…?

I'd survived this far by following the tree. An important nexus point, where I sent out a single, powerful ripple that somehow didn't seem to interact with anything I could see.

"Cauldron, Cauldron, Cauldron," I heard myself murmur, too quietly for me to hear myself over the engine of the cab. So Beetlejuice was chasing me, was he? "Stop the path right now, Contessa, or I'll take everyone down with me. It takes eight steps for you to kill me, and I can break the real plan in just four."

With a gasp, I felt my web return.

"Door to Cauldron," I heard myself say, and I tumbled backward through the seat of the car. My mental model flared, and I found the thing that fought to cancel my powers, readying my telekinesis to activate their kill switch at a moment's notice. My mind divided as I held tightly to a picture of my body without any bullet holes in me, and I felt my telekinesis armor me, as temporary as that might be against someone like this. The potential for a portal came into being, and I placed a telekinetic knife at the throat of the being responsible.

A woman sat in a chair, looking more confused than anything, the pistol in her hand. "Stop that," she said to me, annoyed. I glared up at her.

"You've killed me more than two thousand times since I woke up this morning. You don't get to talk like that."

She cocked her head. "You're reacting to my Path."

I blinked. Could she see the web too? "Why were you coming to kill me this morning?"

Her eyes narrowed, but I could see interest in them. "No, that wasn't it. You could see my final goals, but not the steps in between. Who are you?"

"Let me go home, and I won't ruin your plan." An absolute bluff. Considering her lack of reaction, she knew that I wasn't using a mental model to back up the threat.

The woman ran a hand across her chin slowly. "You worked backward until you got to the point where you learned my original goal. How close am I?"

I climbed up from my position on the floor. "I'll answer your questions if you answer mine. I already know that I can keep up with you long enough to cause you problems, so you're going to _take me seriously. _Now. Why were you trying to kill me?"

The woman seemed to evaluate me slowly. "You're a very tenacious young woman. We took Coil into custody last night."

I froze. "He's your friend?"

"He's an asset, at least. But I've come to believe that having him as an asset wouldn't be quite as useful as having you would be."

My eyes blazed. "That's exactly the kind of thinking that got him locked up in the first place. Trust me, I didn't need to lock him up."

"Do you know how long it's been since I've had a conversation without my power active?" she said, leaning forward. "Because I don't. Not when it comes to dangerous unknowns like yourself. Do yourself a favor and let the things beyond your scope remain that way. Door her home."

I fell a foot onto my bed with a yelp, my eyes wide as I panted, feeling a cold sweat on my brow.

Okay then. My precognition _wasn't_ as infallible as I'd thought.

* * *

**You're probably going to have to forgive me for likely butchering the US legal system in this chapter, but I'll only do so much research for something that ends up theoretical in the story. You guys are very patient to read about so many things that aren't happening, in fanfiction about something else that never happened. But it's just as real to Taylor as it is to me as an author, so I decided that the journey she took would be well worth the write.**

**Yes, I'm well aware that Fortuna can't see Endbringers, but I've decided in this story that it's more due to the fact that their actions are directed by Eidolon than by anything inherent to them. That means that Taylor is fair game. And I really need to apologize about how all over the place it got when it went Thinker against Thinker, but I did need to balance your awareness with Taylor's. **

**Contessa wasn't doing much for that whole chase. She was using the Path to Learn About Taylor Hebert, and everything beyond that was a result of Taylor trying to outpace Contessa's speed of thought as the Path tried to whittle Taylor's strings down to a single option. It suffers from tunnel vision, after all. When The Number Man and Mantellum showed up, those were just the contingencies she would have resorted to, had Taylor started using her powers more offensively. In Fortuna's mind, she just sat in a chair and wondered why the Path to Victory kept shifting.**

**But as you saw, Taylor did manage to outpace her when her theoretical string managed to interact with Contessa's, and she was able to say the right things to get Contessa's attention. Since just about all of Contessa's paths have the corollary 'unless it interferes with other active paths', her future self was convinced enough to back off. I do know how much of a cop-out it is to reveal these things here rather than in the story, but I absolutely hated the interlude I tried to write about it, and I didn't want to leave your understanding to chance. **

**No, Taylor didn't beat the Path to Victory. Contessa won, just in a far more interesting way than she'd expected to. She still had the option of killing Taylor just about whenever, but her Path is a laser-focused one that just happened to have a couple hundred mirrors it needed to bounce off before it would reach its goal this time around. She probably would have had a much easier time if she'd been there in person, rather than using the Clairvoyant and Doormaker, who were accidentally dealing with each fractal result of Taylor's strings, rather than each of the root causes that she'd be able to shut down if she'd just gotten up off her butt.**

**All things considered, Cauldron was very much going to take notice, and due to the nature of Taylor's powerset, she noticed back. As is, they're aware of her existence and has made contact, but I don't fancy trying to write another sequence where Taylor tries to take on the most powerful parahuman around.**


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

I laid low for the rest of the school week, rather unenthused about stumbling onto more opportunities to be vastly outclassed by a previously unknown actor.

The PRT handled their business with remarkable efficiency, particularly relative to their previous oversight of my whole… situation. I edited the model once before execution, to preemptively take care of any alterations that Wednesday's debacle could have caused, but I was shocked to find that the only changes came from my own string. Whoever that woman was, she was next to perfect when it came to covering her tracks.

I found myself mulling over my most recent webs once again. I was still lacking something, and I wasn't able to put my finger on it. I could simulate a situation where I'd need legal references, then find myself already in possession with them earlier in my string, but when I'd faced down that Thinker, she'd adapted and circumvented my results. I'd placed results far into the future, and she'd just show up then to kill me, rather than where I actually was.

And I'd been trying to model my current situation a dozen times over, but I hadn't been given the words to say until I'd reached that nexus point. Somehow more important than an interaction, but in no way that I could describe.

My endstate hadn't changed, but my current state had. Shouldn't that have just led me to alter my current state until I'd reached the right conditions to achieve survival? That was how my power worked, after all.

But no, clearly it didn't. I'd been asking the right questions, I was certain, and I was doing everything I could do to gain the information necessary to keep asking more questions. Adding new endstates hadn't worked, until suddenly they did. Had the question changed?

I gained information with my power, and I used that information to gain more information. What if my power was running that loop as well?

New theory. My abilities were based on simulated choices, and I would select options based on their usefulness to my situation. Maybe my power was already humming away in the background, refining each choice and discarding the ones I was unlikely to pick. That's why brainstorming would work: when I'd already simulated myself doing the hard part, I could find an answer that was satisfactory to my situation.

But what if that, in itself, was a stumbling block? If I was willing to look for a solution that was simply good enough, then maybe I was preventing the simulation from running to its full capacity. As I'd already seen, though, especially unlikely outcomes were difficult to find. Because I'd limited myself, or because I was reaching the peak of my processing capability?

It was more than that, though. When I'd used my power to try and figure out my power, I'd created a loop that seemed to give me sufficient understanding. Maybe the issue wasn't with the end state, but rather with the starting point.

I'd been assuming that my models could lead me to the right interactions to correct any of my misconceptions. But if I was using feedback loops that were already based on incorrect data, I'd just be looking until I found evidence that could support my own flawed starting point. And with the supercomputer that was my power, I could likely find evidence in just about anything.

If that was the case, I was vulnerable once again. I needed a better base of information before I could fully trust in my own capabilities. Or rather, I simply needed the potential to do so.

If I could simulate possibilities, then I could expand the initial evidence-gathering steps. And while it was suspicious, my power had already gifted me with an interaction that I hadn't given the proper respect to.

My model was already building. Maybe Sarah Livesey would be interested in meeting up. I needed contacts, and a Thinker who filled in the gaps would be the perfect place to start.

* * *

"I have to say, I really didn't expect to hear from you again. I was actually already in Boston by the time you messaged me." Sarah greeted me with a mild smile, sitting down across from me in the coffee shop

I frowned, cocking my head. "I thought I'd handled your problem here?" This place didn't have very good tea, so I was already a bit annoyed, but I had the sense that if I insisted on a certain meeting place, she'd get annoyed with me.

Her face went a bit sober, though I could tell she was doing her best to keep her smile. She wanted me to feel like she wasn't worried, most likely. I doubted I was the only Thinker with trust issues. "I'm a small fish in a big pond around here. I'm much better suited where I can keep my head down a bit easier." And there was that thing with her name. Couldn't have done me any favors by pulling that little tidbit of knowledge out from nowhere.

"I can understand that." Her eyes lit up, and I could already tell that I was going to regret my choice of words.

"You had an encounter, then. Got in a fight? Nope, not quite. Power against power, though. And you survived, so you clearly came out on top. No? Wow. They let you go, then?" Her words came like rapid-fire, and she seemed not to notice me wince.

"I'm doing my best to keep from using my powers here. Do you think you could extend that same courtesy to me, maybe?" I asked, annoyance creeping into my voice. She gave me an embarrassed smile, but even with my lack of social skills, I could tell that it was solely for my benefit.

"Of course, of course. But mine's always on, you know. I can't ignore it for long, and someone like you has to have such interesting secrets to spill." There was a sharp glint in her eye that I really didn't like.

"I've also got some secrets that are dangerous to know. So it's not just for my sanity." Her smile faded by another shade.

"You're serious. Okay, I'm sorry. We'll just have to stay away from talking about that, right?"

I nodded. "Yeah, of course." I paused, searching for my words. In the back of my mind, I wondered if that made it obvious I wasn't using my power, or if her ability would give her a false positive instead, telling her that I was using my power to better manipulate her by confirming a piece of evidence so obviously? Sure, she'd likely be able to tell, but she was very rightfully paranoid, and my power seemed to do everything it could to confirm my own biases. "How often is your power wrong about stuff?"

She looked surprised at the question, as though she'd been expecting something else. "Not often, but enough that I need to be aware of it. You've been leaning on it too heavily, then?"

Hit the nail right on the head. I saw her smirk, so my wordless confirmation had likely been displayed over my head like a neon sign. Or whatever her equivalent of my strings was like. "Something like that. But I need to. Not just for myself."

Sarah cocked her head. "You're a hero, then. With the Wards already? No, looser than that. Working with the Protectorate, though. Do you spot threats for them?"

I held up a hand to stem the flow before it started in earnest. "Stop that. I can tell that you enjoy it, but if you let me talk about the things I wanted your opinion on, then we can keep talking for a while longer."

"Sorry." She definitely wasn't.

I sighed. "You know what you're doing better than I do. What do I need to know?" I'd mapped out this conversation earlier, but I'd decided to use it only as a reference, to judge her reactions ahead of time and stay a bit ahead of the conversation. My predictions would fail more and more as she continued to use her power, her string darting and twisting itself into more interactions that I wasn't expecting, but it was still a comfort to know what questions I should ask to start getting her insight into my problems.

Hah, and that was supposed to be my thing.

She gave me a long look, and I felt like she was trying to dissect me with her eyes. I kept myself from shifting, but I didn't doubt that she noticed. Must mean that she didn't care if I was a bit uncomfortable, right? "Being a Thinker, you can't rely on your ability more than you rely on your own mind," she said finally. "The unsuccessful ones are those who use it as a crutch, rather than as a supplement. Or that's a bad metaphor. Imagine the difference between using it as a walking stick instead of as a pole vault. You still need to use your actual legs, and it might be a bit more difficult than if you had the support, but you use your legs to get yourself to the point that you use your pole, and you can perform a much more difficult task. Make sense?"

I paused, nodding thoughtfully. "But there's the thing. When I use my power heavily, I can…" Damn, but I was about to open up to someone who was almost certainly capable of discovering the full extent of my abilities. I didn't want to threaten her or to use any models to put her in an endstate where she couldn't hurt me, just as I'd done to Sophia. "I can do a lot of good," I said finally. "Things that no one else could. Small things, but so many of them. And I feel like I have a responsibility to them."

"Hmm." I already didn't like what she was about to say, but at least she hadn't been picking up on my inner monologue. Any luck, and she might think that this was the thing I was conflicted about. "This responsibility. You're afraid that if you stop, then you're going to stop caring, right?"

Damn her. "Don't psychoanalyze me."

"I'm not. You're saying that you're the only one who can do it, right? Are you sure about that?" She sounded almost gentle, and I winced.

"Can you do your best to ignore your power for a second? And can I be completely open with you?" I hated this. It went against everything that I believed, trusting someone like this. And I was in completely unfamiliar territory. I hadn't modeled this, and I was already out of my depth by considering it.

"I'll do my best."

I took a breath. "No, I'm not. But I can also cause events that will cause other people to be drawn to problems that they can solve. But that puts me back in the first problem, where I have to have my power active if I'm going to distract people into turning their heads at the right time." I gave in, I'll admit it, but it was a very quick model, just to peek forward to a conclusion where she wouldn't draw any immediate Endbringer-related conclusions.

She cocked her head. "And how far-reaching can you extend those ripples?" I blinked. Why'd she chosen to use that word? Surely there were plenty of other ways she could have described it, but that was exactly how I'd decided to describe it in my head. She might have more knowledge of my inner monologue than I'd previously thought.

Sarah was still waiting for me to respond. "Oh, uh, I haven't actually seen, yet," I said, stumbling slightly over my words. "Like you brought up earlier, I'm in contact with the PRT. I'll call in a bit of advice, or at their request, and they do all the heavy lifting."

"Then that's enough, right?" she said. "You're doing your thing, the other heroes in the city will do much better, and you can make this place safer for everyone."

I opened my mouth to respond, but she put up her hand. "But you're also suffering from the same problem that a lot of capes do. You're overly focused on how your power will affect capes. I had the same problem; my first instinct was to steal from supervillains, rather than from their goons who also have wallets."

I blinked. "You know I work for the PRT, right?"

"You work with them," she said dismissively, waving one hand idly. "Point being, if you're on call for the people who find themselves in over their heads, why not cast a wider net? Give the police your number, and the fire department, maybe New Wave, or even groups in other cities. Spend an hour or two every day coming up with solutions for as many people as you can in that time, and then just… give it a rest."

I deflated. She was very, very right. I'd thought I'd found a single outlet when it was an entire genre that I should be exploring. "Exact same problem, then. Why shouldn't I spend all my time on that?"

Sarah shrugged. "Because they'll have your number too. When there's a crisis, you'll be able to help. There's no need for you to be in charge of finding all the crises in the city when you're already busy solving them."

It resonated with me hard, and not in a purely metaphorical sense. I could feel my string vibrating, possibilities extending before me. Earlier this week, I'd thought I'd had a breakthrough when I'd realized that I could help other people by sending people their way. But it was the precise problem I'd met before. Once I'd found a solution I was willing to accept, I was satisfied with that outcome, and I executed it. It was complacency, plain and simple. I needed to be better than that.

I'd been silent for a long while, and I finally noticed the contemplative look on Sarah's face. "Mind telling me about your power in a bit more detail? Is it just Thinking that you can do?"

"Something like that." I felt a knot in my stomach. Instinct or paranoia? I was having a hard time telling those two apart, these days. I wasn't using a model, right? Maybe I should be. Or if I couldn't tell, maybe I should take Sarah's advice and take a step back from overusing it.

And then, I felt my paranoia start to pay off. My face went stony as I saw her expression shift into amusement, then to sobriety, then to fear. I exhaled, and when I found my voice, it was far quieter than I'd have liked.

"I thought you were supposed to fill in the gaps. What clues did I give for that one, huh?" Even to my own ears, I sounded hollow.

"You made it sound like you were a Thinker/Shaker," she said, a slight tremor hidden in her tone. "But with how you were talking, I started wondering how exactly you manage to make ripples. I had a sense that it wasn't really just from your actions."

I dropped my eyes to my drink. I hadn't even touched it. Wasn't that the point of meeting someone over tea, so you'd have a nice excuse to interrupt yourself as you thought of what you were supposed to say next? I'd been trying to take her advice, not tracing the strings of this conversation. I was so dumb, letting my guard down around someone who's power seemed built to reveal secrets. I couldn't even blame this meeting on her. I'd been the one to reach out.

I exhaled slowly through my nose. "You've really made a habit of that, huh?" I said, turning my eyes up to meet hers. I saw her brows quirk in confusion, adding notes of new curiosity that somehow remained, even in her fear.

"I think I might have jumped to some hasty conclusions," she admitted.

"That's the thing. I think you haven't." Why was my gaze so steady? I'd just ruined this opportunity to talk to someone who could relate to me. Probably one of the few people I'd ever meet who could. "Tell me what you've figured out."

"Did you trigger last week?" Maybe that was why. I'd started too quickly, and I seemed too inexperienced. Of course it would be endlessly easier to connect me to the Simurgh now, when it's so recent and at the forefront of everyone's mind. That, with the endless clues I'd been dropping about how far my effects can reach, how I can touch countless lives with my abilities.

She'd tell everyone. I'd be hunted down and killed, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do against the entire world when they banded together against me. I kickstarted my web, diving forward in time as far as I could go, searching frantically for some sliver of hope. I ignored the present, ignored everything that would delay me. I needed to grasp onto a model and to not let go until this problem was solved. Because she knew that I was the kind of thing that could bring heroes and villains to fight side by side, a genocidal-

"It must be so fresh in your mind. I'm so sorry that you're dealing with all this, so soon." My vision went fuzzy, and I choked back a sob. She was a Thinker. She was using her power, almost certainly. She was just saying things that would keep her alive. She knew what I was. She-

I lost track of my web once again as her string darted aside, away from all projections that I'd been keeping track of. She reached out and put a hand over mine, as tears rolled down my face.

* * *

**Yup, Tattletale's found herself in yet another alternate universe where she has to babysit a latent S-class Taylor and keep her sane. She's just too well-suited to the job, and too nosy to keep from finding out. Fortunately for Taylor, she's already handled the people in town who've puzzled out her secret, and we'll be able to start getting into that thankless job of cleaning up the city.**

**Sorry for the shorter chapter, but I finished just about everything I wanted to do in this scene, and the next bit is too removed for me to transition over smoothly. Thanks to everyone leaving reviews, and I'll try to post again tomorrow. ****Should only be one or two more chapters before we start getting into that hot cape-on-cape action. Fighting. That's what I meant.**

**Thanks to everyone posting a review. Anytime I get a critique on my work, I have something to think about moving forward, and I appreciate anything that will help me improve this story. We've been moving at a pretty rapid pace, and I expect that to continue for another week or two at the least, though I'll have to taper it off after that as I start school again. ****Should only be one or two more chapters before we start getting into that hot cape-on-cape action. Fighting. That's what I meant.**

**Thanks to everyone posting a review. Anytime I get a critique on my work, I have something to think about moving forward, and I appreciate anything that will help me improve this story. We've been moving at a pretty rapid pace, and I expect that to continue for another week or two at the least, though I'll have to taper it off after that as I start school again.**


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Sarah, or rather, Lisa, as I'd learned she preferred, stayed with me for a long time after that, before quietly giving me a bit of space to collect myself as I came down. I felt… understood. Accepted by virtue of true empathy. She'd survived her own Trigger, and at the moment that I expected to be abandoned, she used her own experience to give me what I'd been starved of.

Would I even be capable of that? I'd never thought of the locker in terms of how I could keep it from happening to others. What kind of person was she, that she could choose instead to save me?

A very scared one, the dark voice in the back of my head told me. One that had discovered the depths of power that lay within me and knew that she needed to be as far away from me as possible when she turned on me. I'd thought I'd known Emma, and I'd seen the depths of her cruelty firsthand. I didn't know Lisa at all, beyond the knowledge that she had a dangerous Thinker ability that could expose me with ease.

I tried not to. I really did. I knew that I struggled to trust people, that I wasn't supposed to use my power as a crutch, but I had to know. I traced my unaltered string forward by a day, then another, and on and on. The Triumvirate didn't appear, I didn't find myself on the run, and Lisa proved herself trustworthy.

Because she knew I'd check. The thought gnawed at the inside of my brain, demanding my attention. She was a Thinker, and I knew how Thinkers would fight. We'd make arrangements, contingencies, we'd plan and prepare and make certain that we could strike with absolute certainty of victory. And her string would shift in my web every time she learned something new from her power. What if I couldn't shift my web in time to destroy all the ripples she'd create when she decided to betray me?

And yet, in the moment when she'd be most likely to, she didn't. It was a conscious effort from me to draw the thought out, but it was there, and it fought against my dark inner voice. As I held the reminder close to my heart, I saw my own string shift. Seeing my path shift as my thoughts crystalized, I felt myself slowly achieve a measure of peace with my decision. It's what I needed. I looked away from my web, leaving it behind. I had work to do, and my trust issues had no place in it.

Two quick models later, and I'd completed the phone calls I needed to be taken seriously with the police and fire department. It required that I downplay my abilities, as they didn't have any experience with my capabilities yet, but I'd be able to prove myself after their first calls, and I'd likely be able to start sending them predictions within the month. The police wouldn't be able to act before a crime was committed, and there were significant limits on how Thinker abilities could be used in prosecution, but I could certainly make sure that bad situations could turn out a little bit better.

I was on the verge of calling New Wave as well before I shut my phone and returned it to my pocket. I'd rather investigate them a little first, no matter how theoretically useful Carol Dallon had been when I'd ruined Blackwell's weekend in my mind. God, but it was confusing to think about these things. They cooperated with the PRT; maybe they'd get my contact information more organically, and after I'd established myself a bit better.

Were those my trust issues rearing their ugly heads again? They were heroes, and they helped people all throughout the city. Of course they could use my help. I wasn't sure why I didn't want to offer it yet, but I just…

Didn't.

Huh.

Once I'd made my way home, Dad stayed out of my way, seeing my blank expression as I sat on the couch and started navigating my web again. I interrupted myself to share a brief conversation with him; I wasn't doing anything that needed doing now. And he'd been supporting me, no matter how strange it must have seemed.

Tonight's project was about betrayal, but enjoyably enough, not about a potential future betrayal that would demonize my family name for years to come. No, my worries about Lisa had gotten me thinking.

Emma had betrayed me, and I didn't know why. And I certainly didn't lack the resources to find out, at least not anymore. I didn't waste time following my own string backwards through time. I didn't know if my power could project past my Trigger, but I certainly didn't feel like glancing at the locker again, brief as it might be to do so. No, instead I modeled reconciliation.

It felt disgusting, to an extent. Like I was crawling back to her, belly-up, unable to move on, regardless of all the abuse she'd caused. But there it was, as clear as day, as I saw a possible future where I sat on her bed, tears on both our faces.

I didn't want to play this in reverse, but the node hadn't been difficult to find, so I didn't worry too much about losing it. I fumbled around with my strings rather blindly, considering my attention was still on the endstate, and grasped the initial intersection, turning my attention to it and allowing it to flow into my mind.

I was at Winslow, and I isolated Emma immediately with a battery of words that sent each of her followers scurrying. Nope. I was going to pretend to do this nicely, no matter how satisfying this version was to fantasize about. Still fumbling around semi-blindly, I found a mental model that required fewer strings.

I sent Madison scurrying away in tears in this one. You know what, I'd take it. Emma was rarely without a clique, and running into her with just one person backing her up was rare enough as it is. Madison had been promoted recently, in the aftermath of Sophia's transfer out of town. Good for her, finally moving up in the world. I wondered if Julia would take Madison's old job, or if a different hanger-on would fill the position. Emma was always recruiting for her crusade against me, after all.

And then, a confrontation. I took a few barbs, and I saw my eyes tear up, before I apologized for retaliating. Watching it play out, I didn't even know what I was watching. Emma was waiting for _me_ to apologize to _her_? I had to restrain myself from finding another revenge fantasy to watch.

I apologized for making a haircut joke. She demanded to know how I'd known. I saw my lips move, words come pouring out, tears still rolling down my cheeks, one after the other. I had never felt so removed from a simulation.

I saw myself explain that I'd failed her. That I wasn't there when she needed me. That in some way, staying quiet all this time was my penance for letting her go through that alone. Emma would back up, demanding answers, why I'd never said anything. I said that she was strong, and if the best way for her to do that was to take it out on me, then I'd have to be strong enough to take it without complaint.

Emma's eyes would tear up, but she'd resort to anger. Her anger would die when I apologized for lashing out when I'd brought up her trauma, and she'd collapse into tears when I promised that I could be strong for her again and that I hoped she was still in touch with Sophia.

I was stunned at the sight, at least before the fury began to build inside me. _That_ was why she'd turned on me? Because I'd been at a fucking _summer camp_? The nerve of that-

I closed my eyes and let the simulation drop. I needed it gone. That simulation was a travesty, and every moment I spent holding on to those strings was making me angrier. At least I knew that there was a reason, right?

That justification didn't help me come to terms with it in the slightest. No, there was more to the story. There had to be. A reason for my word choice, for the justifications I'd used, for why the haircut was so important. She'd suffered a trauma. Let's start there.

Simulation after simulation, and my fury quieted, but didn't decrease. It just grew colder, as I saw more and more instances that would demand I take responsibility for Emma's torture of me.

A mugging, and one stopped by Sophia. Emma had decided, over the course of five days, that she had to be strong, and that the only way to do so was to destroy her old, weaker self. I was the embodiment of that, and therefore, a valid target for her hate. This was making me sick.

One more model. For old times' sake. With a couple of tweaks, the PRT would open investigations into Shadow Stalker's old cases, and with another pull, one incident logged with the police would find its way to the top of the PRT's stack of files. An officer would go to the Barnes household, and I played the strings in a gentle rhythm to direct the conversation towards Emma's changed mental state. Her father, as protective as he was, would be convinced to take advantage of the PRT's offer of therapy.

It was the most frustrating model I'd had to date. When Sophia's string had entangled with Emma's, they had resonated and fed off each other in a sort of brutal codependence. I assumed it had, rather, as I hadn't had this insight at the time. Trying to stem the flow of ripples from here on out was like trying to still the surface of a pond that had been bubbling for years.

I thought about noise cancelling headphones, how they used inverse waves to muffle incoming sounds, but I discarded the metaphor quickly enough. That principle could only mask sounds at the ear by virtue of intersecting at a single point in space. Here, I was trying to play the strings of the future to create inverse waves that would expand at the same points that Emma was located, nullifying the malignant ripples she extended into the web.

As the thought crystalized, I saw a single strand appear. That might not be the right word. Come into focus, perhaps? But it seemed more like it was there all along, and I'd just chosen not to see it.

It lead directly from me to Emma, not in any physical sense, but in a mental one. Modeling its outcome, I felt myself grow cold.

If I didn't like the sound a guitar string was playing, then I could still it instead. The strand was a simple command, like a reset button. A Master effect.

I swallowed. The possibilities that lay before me revealed themselves based on how likely they were to be selected. If this possibility was revealing itself, did that mean that I was willing to use Master abilities? I'd decided that I wouldn't, right?

I was crippling myself, I felt my inner monologue whisper. An insidious thought, one that I wanted nothing to do with. If things would be better without Emma's current actions, why shouldn't I place my hand on her string, let her play her own music once again? I'd loved that music for so much of my life, until that one _fucking_ day, when she'd turned on me.

Damn her. I wouldn't do it, but damn her for the temptation. She'd be the one to climb out of the hole she put herself into, and she should be thanking for me for tossing her a rope. No matter that I was some eight steps removed from the chain of events and she'd hopefully never find out my involvement.

Tomorrow morning, the Merchants' would, Thinker interference notwithstanding, attack at the docks. Squealer would overextend herself, and Velocity would be in the perfect position to take advantage of that fact. As my model updated, I saw a single change: two spare containment foam grenades on his belt that hadn't been there before. Just being cautious, and it wouldn't affect the outcome. I let my models drop, satisfied that I wouldn't even need to call in a prediction amendment to the PRT before I fell asleep.

I'd learned about Thinker powers from Lisa. Were there any nonthreatening Masters around, to get some situational awareness in that department? It really would be good to hear their thoughts on the subject. Maybe it would help me reconcile my issues with that aspect of my power. Or maybe it'd just lead to me being distracted by more possibility strings that I'd consider over the line.

A model started to form, almost automatically, before I dismissed it. That would be a problem for tomorrow.

* * *

I was at the library again; I'd likely have to try and get a computer at home one of these days, if I ever figured out a way to make money from my ability without feeling like a dirty cheat in the process. I was sure that I'd get there eventually, but for now, the library was enough.

I'd latched on to that idea I had last night, and was already researching notable Masters that might qualify for a useful interview. Villain, villain, villain, villain, I noted as I scrolled through PHO, already getting annoyed at what I was finding. It wasn't a very heroic power classification, I'd admit, but there was certainly a lot of good that you could do with it, right? It just took a bit of effort to spin with the PR department.

We'd talked about it in Gladly's class more than once. Do evil people get evil powers, or is the correlation somehow being misinterpreted? I really hoped that it was the second, because otherwise, I might be the worst person alive, considering my powerset.

Sure, just about any power could be used for good things or for bad things. I could Think up a way to ruin everyone's lives that I could touch, or I could Think them back into place. And Purity looked like a perfect example of a good guy power that just happened to be in the hands of a raging racist. And there were people like Oni Lee, who'd clearly made decisions that allowed them to use his power to be a one-man stream of suicide bombers.

Maybe it was just like with Tinkers. Tinkers tended to gravitate towards membership in hero teams, where they could make the most of their abilities with resources and legitimate backing, as well as the opportunity to work alongside other similarly-minded people. Maybe it was the nature of Master powers to be drawn towards villainy.

As the idea started to crystalize in my mind, I started to like it less and less. If that were the case, then there really wouldn't be much difference between heroes and villains. Just capes that sought different opportunities than others. And while the local Protectorate certainly wasn't in my good graces, they did help people. That couldn't be solely because they liked the attention.

Strangers too. That was worth considering. It's why the PRT had Master/Stranger protocols, after all. I opened another tab and started searching for heroic Strangers, when I was greeted with an uncomfortably similar result.

There was Shadow Stalker, who I was rather well acquainted with, prominently displayed in the 'Local' tab. Someone probably needed to update this page. Flicking through the complete list, I saw another wave of villains. Sure were a lot of them. Though that was already a skewed statistic, considering that something like two thirds of capes went that route. Or was it three fourths?

Master/Stranger protocols. I could probably get around those easily enough, right? A subtle enough alteration, and it would look like a purely organic decision made by my target, nothing remaining to tie them to me. I pushed the thought out of my head. No matter that I was seeking out another Master to learn from; I wasn't going to start making contingencies against the Protectorate until I actually had a reason to do so.

_If._ The thought came to me far too easily, an aimless drive towards conflict. And a subtle one, too, considering that I was only able to recognize it the first few times by observing my own string. Like Lisa had said, I'd been too focused on using my power against parahumans, rather than to help people, the way a hero would.

But not like a cape. When was the last time Glory Girl worked with disaster response, or cleanup at an Endbringer attack? She could save lives that way, saving people from collapsed shelters or lifting chunks of concrete too awkward or unfortunately placed for heavy equipment to deal with. And yet, the whole city had decided together that she'd deserved the title 'hero'.

I didn't like where my train of thought was taking me. Villains hurt people, and heroes kept them from doing so. Who'd Lisa hurt, then? She was a thief, and one with a Thinker ability. If that made her a villain, why had she helped me? I felt like I was chasing my own tail. Every step I took towards my goal was pulling my goal further away from my new position.

Find my starting point and proceed from there, I told myself. Just like a string model. People with Master powers tended to be villains. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like there was no place for a Master in the Protectorate's ranks. Maybe the answer was simpler than I was thinking, less insidious. Maybe that just meant that all of the Masters in the world who didn't care to be villains just stayed home. Or maybe they'd been demonized to the point that Masters had no choice but to turn to villainy.

So. Back to the top of the list, this time, without discarding the option of talking to any villains. I pulled up a third tab and pulled up the search engine, looking for news stories about notable Masters.

It was slow work, and every article I read was a reminder of how people would look at me if this aspect of my ability came out. America loved to hate Masters, it seemed. I couldn't even blame them, not really. It was terrifying, thinking that someone could reach out, take hold of my string, and choose my path for me.

A stubborn part of my mind refused to accept that Mastering was any different from my Thinker manipulation. What was the difference between causing someone to act in a certain way through a telekinetic nudge on the environment and just placing their string in a new position anyway? The effect would be the same, and their freedom of choice had been taken away the moment I'd modeled an outcome and resolved to make it so.

The Thinker I'd fought earlier that week was evidence enough of that. She'd looked bemused when I'd arrived; not shocked at being outmaneuvered, not annoyance at seeing how long I'd resisted her. Bemusement, like she'd expected the outcome to happen in a different way.

I had no misconceptions that she'd have been able to kill me before I'd be able to kill her. She could see my string, after all, or whatever her equivalent of it was. I'd needed a head start to keep ahead of her for any amount of time, and there was no way that I could have outpaced her in the moment. I took time to make decisions. She didn't. She existed outside my decision-making loop, and she'd known the outcome before it happened. Had I tried anything, the only change in outcome would be that I would have lost in a far more permanent fashion.

The difference between her and me was the same difference between me and anyone else. A difference so complete that my own choices didn't factor into the outcome. I'd played to her game just as easily as if she played my string herself. As easily as if she was a Master.

But the difference was in the name. Since she controlled circumstances, she wasn't one of _them_. At least she hadn't played with my brain, not directly. It stank of hypocrisy. And yet, I had the exact same biases. I'd shied away from using Master effects, even as I found other ways to cause the exact same effects.

My train of thought faded away as I discovered the perfect instructor. A reluctant Master, one being prosecuted for accidental use of a power. She was being fast-tracked through the judicial system, and she was expected to receive a Birdcage sentence. Could I stop it? Easily. Should I? I almost answered with the same speed before I forced myself to consider my actions. Possibly, I decided grudgingly. But if I intended to save her, then I'd first need to buy her time. My focus expanded as my web sprawled before me, and I found an interaction where I sat in a room with one Paige Mcabee, congratulating her on her successful appeal.

A good starting point. But 'good' likely wasn't enough to save this woman. I searched, then opened an email account and began to type furiously, holding tight to the image I had in my head. Time to be a hero again.

* * *

**I usually hate when Taylor reconciles with her bullies, and I think that very few people manage to do it in a satisfying way. I also think that Emma has issues that go quite a bit deeper than most people give her credit for if she was willing to do a heel-face turn in such a short period of time. She's very easily influenced, but she certainly needs to be catered to, hence the extremely unsatisfying resolution.**

**I'm aware of the strong fix-fic vibes this story is starting to give off, yes, but I'm actually going to blame Taylor for that, and definitely not myself projecting when writing in the first person. She'd wanted to be a hero when all she had were bug powers, getting way in over her head on her first night out in costume because she heard something bad would happen to some strangers. Now that she can see the strings of everyone around her, she's going to involve herself in as many problems that she can, and due to the nature of the Simurgh's precognition, they've been turning out pretty well so far. I bet it's going to be smooth sailing for here on out, and Taylor can finally find time to take a nap every once in a while.**

**Who am I kidding, this is Worm. **


End file.
